Paper prepared for Kellys
Presidential Address in 1957 to the Clinical Division of the
American Psychological Association.

It is a common experience among those who, in
the headlong pursuit of their occupation, pause occasionally to
sketch some guidelines for their patterns of thought to discover
that the principles they have so carefully defined were once
artfully portrayed in Greek legend. I have had this particular
experience in connection with this afternoons topic. It is
a disconcerting experience for not only does it lead one to
question his personal capacity for original thinking but it also
casts doubt upon the wisdom of all those explicit verbal
definitions upon which modern science so largely depends. Of the
two, it is perhaps less upsetting to give up one's claim to
originality. But definition - if one cannot define, how can he
ever hope to progress? Yet it seems to be the irony of explicitly
thinking that such great emphasis is placed on the outer
boundaries that it never touches the heart of the idea.

Not so the Greeks. They, while they might be
accused of being perfectionists, were certainly never
literalists, and even now it seems as they were freer then to say
what they meant than we are. So, before I start rounding up the
precise scientific meaning of this hostility construct by
modern-day methods of circumlocution, let me just tell you very
briefly how the Greeks got to the heart of the matter and said it
all much more simply than I would ever dare to.

There was a young man by the name of Theseus
who had been reared under the domination of his mother. One day,
out in the garage or some place, he ran onto an old sword and a
pair of shoes that had belonged to his father. Right then and
there he decided to make a break for it and go look up his
father, who, it appears, had gone away to a national convention a
number of years before and somehow had managed to stay away on
urgent business ever since. Just how his father managed this is
part of the story that has never been quite clear to me. I did
hear, once, that some scandal was involved, but since it seemed
to be none of my business I never looked into the matter. I am
sure that it is not an important part of the story.

Now this young victim of "momism", as
it existed in the classic Greek era, became quite a hero by the
time he caught up with his old man - a combination of fact which,
it seems to me, some alert publicity-minded psychiatrist ought to
be able to capitalize on. For one thing, along the road, Theseus
ran into a character by the name of Procrustes.

This fellow had bought a small place way out in
the country where the road wound through a deserted canyon. Some
people say his real name was Damastes, while others insist it was
Polypamon. The mix-up was probably because people going by where
always in such a hurry that they didnt take time to read
the Greek letters on his mailbox. In any case, people thereabouts
all called him by his nickname, "Stretch", which is
what the word "procrustes" means in English.

Stretch Damastes was hostile. That, of course,
is the whole point of telling this story. I dont think he
ever meant to be hostile. His feelings would probably have been
hurt if anyone had even suggested the idea. As a matter of fact,
it is quite possible that no one ever mention it to him. In those
times not many people went in for psychoanalysis and you could
easily go for weeks without so much as once having someone
interpret your unconscious motivation to you.

I am sure that Stretch was not really out to
hurt people. The fact that his guests always seemed to have such
a bad time of it was just one of those unfortunate things that so
often seem to happen in spite of everything you do to make people
comfortable.

Because he happened to be hostile, Stretch was
one of those unlucky souls in this world whose fate it is to be
grossly misunderstood. Why? In the first place he was genuinely
interested in people. I mean genuinely! He had bought this little
chicken ranch, or whatever it was, with the express purpose of
setting up a kind of wayside motel where travellers who found
themselves in this lonely spot at nightfall could be assured of
some old-fashioned hospitality. Moreover, he had in mind that he
would give them their supper and their lodging free. Breakfast,
too, if they happened to want it! He was as thoughtful as that.

Stretch, like most hostile people, had a pretty
clear idea of how guests should be treated. He really fancied
himself as a host and along about sundown he used to stand out by
the front gate, lean against the mailbox, and wait to see if he
could persuade some traveller to stop in for supper. At the table
he always proved to be an excellent conversationalist and, before
his guest realized how late it had gotten to be, it would be time
to go to bed.

There was a bed, as those of you who know the
story probably remember. Some say there were two beds, but most
everyone now agrees that there was only this one. Stretch was
especially concerned that his guest would find the bed just
right. He would fluff up the pillows, press down on the mattress
to show how soft it was, and keep murmuring something about how
much he hoped that the bed would be neither too long nor too
short. In fact, he would fuss around long after the guest was
yawning and ready to turn in. Showing all this solicitude was
what really got him into trouble.

In fact, the poor man would get himself so
worked up over his social role as a host that later, back in his
own room and long after his guest was comfortably asleep, he
would be tossing and turning , worrying himself sick over the
possibility that there might be some flaw in his hospitality. Was
his guest comfortable or not? Had he used the dainty guest towels
in the bathroom? And the guest bed - that was what worried him
most. Did it fit? Maybe he was a little too tall for it; maybe a
little too short - which was it? Throughout the restless night
the thoughts nagged and mounted until they were unbearable.

You can guess what happened, if you do not
already know. In the wee hours of the morning Stretch would
tiptoe to the door of the guest room, open it ever so softly, and
peek in, just to make sure. You can also guess what he saw and
what utter consternation seized him at finding his guest either
too short or too long - never a perfect fit. And now, knowing how
it was that Stretch was trying so hard to be a perfect host, it
is quite easy to see that next he simply had to do what he did.

There are some folks - not very practical
folks, I'm afraid - who think that what he should have done was
cut off the bed to fit the guest; or stretch it, as the case
might be. But if such people would only stop to think for a
moment, they would readily perceive that this would not be
socially adaptive behavior. It would be bound to make the bed the
wrong size for the next guest, not to mention the damage to an
expensive piece of furniture. Of course, Stretch could have gone
back to bed, pulled the covers over his head and said, "To
heck with it!" as some folks who do not have a sincere
interest in people, no doubt, would do.

The rest of the story is not very important,
now that we all appreciate Stretch' s predicament and have
feelings of genuine acceptance for him as a person. You know, of
course, that Theseus who was not a particularly sensitive person,
did Procrustes in - not because of any deep sense of hostile
regard, I'm afraid, but only because Procrustes happened to get
in his way. Theseus was young and ambitious and had his heart set
on being a hero. To his immature mind, life was simply an
aggressive adventure and he still lacked that subtle capacity for
exactitude in the interpretation of human nature that genuinely
hostile people have.

Let me turn now from this classical mode of
expression to the form of semantic discourse with which we are
more familiar. It will take longer to say the same thing, and
much of the meaning will be lost in literalism, but it will sound
more scientific and much more like what a psychologist is
expected to say on an occasion like this.

Over a period of a good many years - many of
them not very productive of publications, I fear - I have
attempted to come to grips with the psychology of man as if I had
only recently come across the species. It was like pretending to
be someone from Mars who had just dropped in to meet these
earth-creatures for the first time and was trying to understand
them. More and more, it seemed to me that what I wanted, in my
role as a stranger on earth, was man's own account of things as
he saw them, as he experienced them, and not merely what
outsiders said about him.

Early in myclinical experience I found
myself repeating over and over to my students, "If you don't
know what is troubling a child, ask him, maybe hell tell
you." And often he did; although it never proved easy for a
clinician to quiet down and hear what the child was saying. To do
so he had to brush away his literalistic biases about what words
naturally meant and pay more attention to what the child meant.
He had to set aside also many of his diagnostic presentiments
about what kinds of packages children come wrapped up in. And as
for listening to adults; thatis even harder. So often the
adult has long since lost track himself of what it was he started
out to say many years ago. By the time he meets the clinician he
can repeat only words and words, wearily making the kinds of
vocal sounds that quickly reverberate themselves away into
lexical emptiness.

If we were to develop a psychology of man from
his own point of view - a psychology of man himself - it could
obviously be neither a prejudiced kind of psychology, nor an
objective one. I repeat - neither prejudiced nor objective! Under
no condition could it be the kind of psychology that merely
points objectively to a man and says, "That thing out there;
let me prod it. I want to see which way it will hop."
Instead, it would have to be an experimental kind of psychology
that would enable one to look all about him and say "So this
is how it is to be a man. So this is the way the world looks
through his eyes. So this is the sense of his behavior. So this
is his framework of cause and effect. So this, at last, is the
mind of man."

At first we  my students and I - started
calling this new psychological point of view, "role
theory".The term seemed a likely name for what
we were thinking. Not only was our route to the understanding of
clients via an appreciation of the part they were attempting to
enact, but psychotherapy, we soon discovered, could often be
developed in terms of a way of life - a role - rather than in
terms of so-called insights which reduced behavior to motivation,
and motivation, in turn, to atavism.

Soon, however, the term "role" began
to appear widely in psychological literature in quite a different
sense. So we temporarily abandoned use of the term and began
talking about a psychology of personal constructs. By this we did
not mean merely a kind of perceptual theory, nor did we mean
merely the realm of objects that fall within a given man's
purview. Rather, we had in mind a psychology that dealt with the
manner in which man comes to grips with his world of reality. The
task was not so much to choose a theory of psychology for
ourselves but, first of all, to establish a frame of reference in
terms of which we might appreciate any man's personal theory of
psychology. For, it seemed to us, it would have to be at the
level of the personal construction of events, without which
construction no man has any psychological footing, that the task
of the psychologist must begin. Indeed, only at this level of the
man' s personal construction, can it ever be said that an event
becomes a stimulus for him, or that an action becomes an
expression of motives within him, or that his behavior is
learned. To overlook this crucial point at which events start to
be interpreted as psychological variables is to become enmeshed
in what Bertrand Russell and others have called the
subject-predicate error of the Indo-European mode of thought.

So we turned to a psychology of personal
constructs. The venture, so far, has been exciting. There have
been hidden surprises waiting for us along the way. Some of them
have been occasions for dismay. I have already mentioned one
surprise when I said that we would have to abandon prejudice and
objectivity both! The very thought of abandoning objectivity
sounds just as wicked to the narrowly indoctrinated psychologist
of today as the idea of abandoning other forms of revealed truths
sounded to the fundamentalists of another generation. Yet the
doctrine of objectivity as currently practiced in our world of
psychology, looks to events as if they somehow abstracted
themselves and spoke out in their own direct revelations of
profound truth.

As we pursue further our line of thinking the
concept of stimulus drops out also. There is simply no way to
keep it in. Reinforcement becomes a question-begging term, at
least in the sense in which it is commonly used. The whole
conceptual area of motivation, as we know it in psychology today,
vanished. Even learning is washed up; when the theory gets
through with it it sounds like a synonym for the verb to
become. In brief, this is not a theory for anyone who likes
to display his Ph.D. diploma on the wall of his office, for
several times a day he will find it glowering down on him in
silent disapproval.

Now, having stirred up this hornets' nest of
scientific convictions, let us deal with a limited part of the
confusion we have attempted to create. (This is known as
establishing an initial atmosphere of unacceptance, in the hope
that in what follows the listener will grasp more eagerly for a
little of something he can make sense out of.) We have chosen the
topic of hostility. Hostility is one of the clinician's most
crucial concerns. Let us see what happens when we apply this kind
of thinking to it. What will it help him to notice? What will it
lead him to look for? What new openings to psychotherapeutic
movement will it provide for his client?

In the psychological realm of discourse, as
contrasted with some of our better developed realms of discourse
such as physics, most of our concepts are projections of two
principle axes of reference - pleasure versus pain and good
versus evil. Since it is assumed that each of us automatically
heads for pleasure and away from pain while trying to get other
people to head for good and away from evil, our psychological
dimensions all begin to look like one-way streets, every one of
them leading in the same general direction. One is reminded of
the fellow who offered to solve any city's traffic problem,
simply by marking a system of one-way streets all leading out of
town. The hitch in such a traffic system is that it does not
provide the citizens with any true mobility. So it is with much
of our psychological thinking; our conceptual network is so
aligned that it does not permit us much mobility in dealing with
our personal problems.

The concept of hostility, as commonly
understood, is just such a notion. If you have got it, it may be
fun but it's bad. If the fellow next door has got it, you may get
hurt. The only thing to do with hostility is get rid of it or get
away from it. Nice people try to keep it bottled up and
psychoanalyzed people try to dump it out somewhere where it won't
do any harm.

The usual understanding of hostility is that it
is an impulse to hurt someone, to cause pain. This definition, it
must be noticed, puts the limiting condition in the experience of
the other person, not in the experience of the hostile person
himself. Yet if we are to have a psychology of man's own
experience, we must anchor our basic concepts in that personal
experience, not in the experiences he causes others to have or
which he appears to seek to cause others to have. Thus, if we
wish to use a concept of hostility at all, we have to ask, what
is the experimental nature of hostility from the standpoint of
the person that has it. Only by answering this question in some
sensible way will we arrive at a concept which makes pure
psychological sense, rather than sociological or moral sense
merely.

What is it like to be hostile? How does it
feel? How does hostility creep into the human enterprise? In
order to get the answers to these questions we have to talk to
people like Procrustes, rather than Theseus. It is in this
respect that psychoanalysis has made two priceless contributions
to the symptomatic understanding of hostility, although I fear
the analyses have done little to develop hostility as a
psychological concept.

One of these contributions has to do with the
recognition of what is symptomatically called, "passive
hostility." This is seen as a way of inflicting injury by
letting people stew in their own juice. It involves keeping
someone's juice as hot as possible in eager anticipation of his
falling in and, when he does fall in, piously pointing out to him
how hot it is.

The other psychoanalytic contribution to our
understanding of hostility symptoms is the description of
incorporative hostility that robs others of their individuality
and brings them helplessly into the orbit of the hostile
persons world. This is what is sometimes called, in the
poetic idiom of psychoanalysis, oral hostility. One of its
manifestations has been coined into the currently popular phrase,
"smother love."

But while the clinical experience of
psychoanalysts, as well as that of psychotherapists of other
persuasions, has led us all to a greater sensitivity to the
variety of symptoms through which hostility is expressed, it has
not so far resulted in better conceptualization, nor has it
contributed much to the movement of psychological theory dealing
with the essential nature of hostility. Hostility is still seen
as the urge to hurt someone, sometimes as the urge to hurt
ones self. Even guilt is seen as the urge to hurt turned
against the self as substitute - preparing one's own juice to be
stewed in. Oral hostility, still viewed as the urge to hurt, is
described as the impulse to destroy as one destroys food by
eating it.

But I think the Greeks, at least the early
Greeks who mostly understood the impulses of man in terms of his
adventures, probably sensed something about hostility that is
easily missed by those who feel they must deal with man in terms
of his pathological symptoms. In this early story of Procrustes
they appear to have embodied part of what they knew about the
nature of the hostile man. There is something humanly plausible
about Procrustes. He did what people do. He could not bear the
thought of being wrong in his estimate of the stature of his
guests. Rather than change his estimate he corrected his guests.
And so this part of the Thesean story has lived and the poetic
imagery of the Procrustean bed has survived to this day.

It is at the point of Procrustes' failure to
anticipate correctly the stature of his guests that the legend
places the fulcrum of hishostility. But this point of
frustration is still only the fulcrum. It takes a massive weight
of personal meaning to tip the scales. In my paraphrasing I have
underscored one original feature of the tale by describing
Procrustes as an ardent host who was genuinely interested in
people. It was only because so much of his world was centered in
his claim to knowing the true dimensions of man that the
invalidating evidence assumed such overwhelming proportions. When
he peeked through the bedroom door that world of his threatened
to collapse.

How to save it! If his bed - his only bed - did
not fit his guest, his guest must be made to fit the bed.
Regardless of the cost, the validity of his bed and the integrity
of his world - which were one and the same thing - must be
sustained. That piece of psychological furniture was for him, not
just a bed, but a vital institution - more important by far than
the physical well-being of just one guest. It was a key to his
way of life. Under the circumstances he did the only thing as far
as he could see, that made sense. And, as I said before, it is
really too bad that Theseus did not sense the situation and do
something constructive about it. Ambitious people are so often
dull-witted about such matters.

From the standpoint of a psychology of personal
constructs, each person, like Procrustes, devises as best he can
a structure for making sense out of a world of humanity in which
he finds himself. Some of this personal structure is cast in
terms of words and he can name the parts for us. But most of it
is expressed only in terms of talk - which is something quite
different from semantic communication - and some of it stands way
back in the shadows of human expression as a background pattern
that is never traced with the fine lines of verbal detail.

Without such patterned structure it would
appear that no man can come to grips with his seething world of
people, nor can he establish himself as a psychological entity.
If one wishes, he can look upon this personal structure of man as
a network of hypotheses: about human nature. But if he does think
of it in terms of hypotheses he should be prepared to envision
hypotheses that are not verbally formulated as well as the kind
of explicitly stated hypotheses that are familiar to research
settings. In any case, like all psychological structure and all
hypotheses, this personal construct system tempts man to make
predictions. And predictions, in turn, have a way of either
occurring or not occurring, and usually being rather obvious
about it.. It is in terms of his predictions, then, that the mind
of man comes at last into firm contact with reality. I would go
even further and say that it is only in terms of his predictions
that man ever touches the real world about him.

Having gone this far with our theorizing it
seems that we have involved ourselves in a kind of psychological
theory in which the notion of validation will have to play a
major part. This is quite all right with us. It fits our clinical
experience. It fits the report experiences of others. It offers
promise of a psychology that will turn its attention to
mans plastic future rather than to his fateful past.

Man predicts what will happen. If it happens,
his prediction is validated, the grounds he used in making it are
strengthened, and he can venture further next time. If it does
not happen, his prediction is invalidated, the structure he used
in making the prediction is brought into question, and the road
ahead becomes less clear.

If now we wish to understand the implications
of an event in a person's life, we shall, in terms of his kind of
psychology, look not only at the event but also at the kind of
wager that was laid on it. Events come and go without necessarily
having anything to do with a person's psychological processes. Of
themselves, they are neither validating nor invalidating, nor is
it meaningful to describe some of them as reinforcements.
Validity is a matter of the relationship between the event as it
happened and what the person expected to happen. More correctly
stated, it is the relationship between the event as he construed
it to happen and what he anticipated.

It is in this relationship between anticipation
and realization that the real fate of man lies. It is a fate in
which be himself is always a key participant, not simply the
victim. To miss this point and to allow ourselves to become
preoccupied with independent forces, socio-dynamics,
psychodynamics, leprechaun theory, demonology, or
stimulus-response mechanics, is to lose sight of the essential
feature of the whole human enterprise.

Now let us strip the Procrustean legend of its
rich narrative structure and trace the central theme of hostility
in the more barren terminology of personal construct theory. A
person has a construct system. It gives him identity. Right or
wrong, it serves to put him in touch with reality. It provides
him with grounds for formulating his anticipations, including his
anticipations about people. Then,one day, perhaps
after a long wait, his expectations are not confirmed. He is
staggered by the implications of his disconfirmation for he has
wagered more of his construct system on the outcome of his
venture than he can afford to lose. If he accepts the outcome and
all its presumed implications he will be left in a state of deep
and pervading confusion.

But wait! There is still something he can do to
save the situation. If he acts quickly he may be able to force
the outcome to conform to his original expectations and give him
a last-minute confirmation of his major premises about human
nature. This is the hostile choice. The key to understanding
hostility from the standpoint of the person himself is in this
instant of decision. Or is it an instant of impulse - it makes no
difference; this is where it is!

In the language of research, we may say that
the hostile person distorts his data to fit his hypotheses. In
the language of the classroom, he puts people in their place. In
the language of economics, he extorts tokens of subservience to
his system of values. In the language of the child, he threatens
to scream loud enough to prove to the neighbours that his parents
have made a horrible mistake. In the language of the divorce
court, since his spouse did not conform to his idealized image of
what a wife should be, the husband sees to it that she is
exhibited to the world as the other kind of woman, "the kind
of person he has always known most women were."Ditto,
hostile wives and "the kind of person they always knew men
were."In the language of nations - we all know
how clearly everything the enemy does expresses "his cruel
and vicious nature."

Instead of saying that such goings-on are the
outcroppings of hostility - hostility being an extrapersonal
force that is supposed to invest the organism - we are saying
that they are the hostility. The essence of hostility is not in
its motivational property - anyone who is alive is on the move -
but in its characteristic way of following up one's mistakes. It
is the substitution of extortion for problem solving. It is the
attempt to collect a bet on a horse that, has already lost. The
hostile person turns from events as they are to payoffs that
belie reality. "See,"he says, "I got paid,
didn't I? That means I was right all along."

Psychologists make frequent use of the
frustration-aggression hypothesis - the notion that the greater
one's disappointment the more violently he will react to it. What
we have been saying may appear to be a restatement of that
hypothesis. But there are important differences. Hostility is not
aggression, although the two terms are frequently used
synonymously. The simplest way to look at aggression is to view
it as adventuresomeness. It means actively formulating one's
expectations specifically about many things, about big things
and, sometimes, about remote matters. It means taking steps to
bring one's hunches to test. And it often means betting large
stakes on the outcome.

While an aggressive person sticks his neck out,
he is not necessarily hostile. He does not necessarily extort
confirmation of personal hypotheses that have already proved
themselves to be invalid. An aggressive conversationalist may
press a point to the place where his companions have to come out
and say exactly what they think. That, of course, is what the
aggressive but non-hostile person wants to know. His companions
may be furious at finding themselves smoked out but, unless their
aggressive friend has a streak of hostility in him, he will not
try to compromise them into agreeing with him. He only wants to
know.

If we take the traditional view that hostility
is the impulse to hurt, it is easy to see how aggression can be
interpreted as hostility. The moment someone hurts he cries
"foul" or "ouch" and the aggressive person is
immediately labelled as hostile, not so much because of any
psychological property of his own make-up but because of the
make-up of the person who is hurt. Of course, if we are rigorous
about it, we can hold to the definition that hostility is present
only when the actor wants to hurt someone. But this definition is
hard to maintain in a world of social thought that describes
persons in terms of how they are reacted to, rather than in terms
of what they are up to. A psychology that is based on the outlook
of man himself does not find it very helpful to define hostility
in terms of its anticipated effect on others. It asks, instead,
for an understanding of the hostile person in terms of what is at
stake in his own life. If we want to understand Procrustes we
talk to Procrustes, not Theseus. We talk to him about his bed. We
talk to him about his role as a host. We find out what he expects
guests to be like.

Now it is quite possible for an aggressive
person to become hostile and, conversely, it is quite possible
for a hostile person to pursue his extortionism by aggressive
means. The aggressive conversationalist we mentioned may, for
example, get himself so far out on a limb that when he discovers
what his friends actually do think he may not be able to take it.
He may then go to pieces in anxious confusion. Or he may pull in
his horns. But he may - he just may - take the hostile course of
action and try to put hisfriends in some kind of spot
where they appear to confirm his point in spite of the realities
of the social situation. On the other hand, take the person who
is hostile to begin with. In his frantic efforts to make the data
fit the hypothesis he may resort to vigorous measures. We can
then say he is also aggressive. Not all hostile people do it this
way; some express their hostility very effectively by the most
passive of means. But they can. And when they do, it is correct
to speak of aggressive hostility.

The frustration-aggression hypothesis, as any
psychologist will tell you, is not a simple formula to apply. In
order to use the formula one has to introduce a number of
qua1ifications, both as to what is to be labelled frustration and
what is to be construed as aggression. Nor can we, from the
standpoint of the psychology of personal constructs, re-label the
formula as a frustration-hostility hypothesis. The hostility is
not proportional to the frustration - to say that would be to
reduce the formula to the stimulus-response paradigm. The
hostility is in the type of solution the person attempts - that
is the personal construct theoretical view.

What about the person who is sadistic? Can we
say that he is simply trying to make his experiment with social
relations yield affirmative evidence? What if he feels like
jumping up and down with glee and excitement every time he sees a
person writhing in pain? Or what about the military flyers who
slap each other on the back and show great delight at having
scored a hit on a military target?Are they thinking of
the agony they have left there on the ground? In either of these
instances, our understanding of hostility would not place the
psychological value primarily on the pain others experienced -
even though we may reserve the right to judge such acts in terms
of moral or social values - but on what is confirmed in the act.
The sadist may (indeed, from our clinical experience we believe
that he does) see in the other persons injury a long
overdue confirmation of his own outlook, a confirmation that has
been denied him in the natural state of affairs. The military
aviator probably tries not to think of what is going on down on
the ground in the target area in the wake of his bomb. In his
case the suffering is less likely to be a relevant psychological
variable. In both cases, what is happening to the other person is
incidental, what is happening to the person himself is what is
crucial.

It may be helpful to see hostility in the
flesh. Before we illustrate in terms of case material, however,
let us review the essential features of hostility from the
standpoint of the psychology of personal constructs.

1. A person construes human nature in his own
way.

2. He makes social predictions on the basis of
this constructions.

3. To set the stage they must be crucial
predictions; that is to say, he must have wagered more on them
than he can afford to lose - more of his construct system, that
is.

4. He turns up invalidating evidence. It is
clear that he was wrong about people. He can no longer ignore the
fact.

5. Moreover, he was overwhelmingly wrong -
basically wrong.

6. In the face of the harsh facts he can, of
course, revise his outlook. But the revision would shake him so
deeply that he is reluctant to undertake it.

7. Alternatively, he could let matters ride -
say to himself, "So I just don't understand people very
well." But this too is an alternative he is reluctant to
choose.

8. Finally, he can close his eyes to reality
and attempt to make people fit the construct bed his system
provides. This is the hostile choice.

Consider a young woman, aged thirty. She grew
up in a home where she was secure in her parents love,
where her father was a stable and constant figure and the
neighbourhood, with its beaches and sand dunes, was a safe and
ever-interesting place to roam in search of childhood adventure.
The only important male figure in her life, aside from her
father, was a boy who was fenced out of that world with social
taboos. At the turn of adolescence her girlfriends start to
desert her and the forms of play they have enjoyed together and
direct their attention to the female pursuit of catching boys
with their newly found charms. What she had discovered up to this
time, to be true about both males and females now seems to be
invalid. At first she is only puzzled. Later she is more than
puzzled - she is confused and anxious. Her mother, too, seems
perturbed that she seems too immature. What the child does not
realize, of course, is that the mother knows that her own years
are rapidly running out and she is unduly apprehensive lest her
daughter still be a child when the time comes to go it alone Soon
the mother's death comes. The father is prostrated with grief and
he is perceived by the child as letting her down. Her first
efforts are to get another man. She will have a man, the kind of
strong man her outlook insists men must be. Even cruelty is
acceptable, if it is accompanied by strength. Yet, whatever male
substitute she finds, the apparent failure of her father to live
up to her expectations of him is still, to her, an inescapable
fact. For a time she extorts from him the tokens of paternal
support - clothes, luxuries, indulgences. This is hostility. But
hostility is difficult to contain within reasonable bounds. She
now has a disillusioned version of what men are - all men. To
make a long story short, she fits all men, including her husband,
into this Procrustean Bed. They are often surprised at how neatly
she tricks them into confirming her hypotheses about the
contemptible weak-kneed creatures. And so, to some extent, is
she. Her gay and tantalizing manner is misleading. Like
Procrustes, she is interested in people, she cannot live without
their company. Like Procrustes, she is an excellent
conversationalist. And, like Procrustes, she has a bed. Soon each
man in her life wakes up to find that he has been chopped down to
just the right size to fit it. This is hostility in the flesh.

Most psychotherapists understand, regardless of
their theoretical persuasion, that the key to the alleviation of
hostility lies in the proper use of aggression. The
psychoanalysts and others look upon aggression as the dynamic
feature of the hostile pattern and insist that it must be allowed
to vent itself before it can be brought under self-control. The
Rogerians provide an atmosphere of acceptance for their clients,
in which we could say, in terms of the frustration-aggression
hypothesis, That the frustration is minimised in order to keep
the aggressive pressure down to a point where the person can
gently come to terms with himself. (There is, of course, much
more to both of these points of view). Certainly both of these
outlooks, I would insist, can be taken as grounds by clinicians
for doing something effective about the hostility.

From the standpoint of the psychology of
personal constructs, however, the emphasis is placed not on the
conceptualization forces driving the individual in spite of
himself but on what he himself does. Hostility is not a dynamism
in the personality, it is part of the personality pattern.
Unfortunate people are not acted upon by hostility, they
themselves make the choices which are describable as hostile. The
psychotherapist turns to aggressive experimentation under proper
psychotherapeutic controls, not to drain it out, but in order to
help the client find other ways of dealing with the invalidity
that confronts him. He reinstates imaginative adventure, but with
fresh ways of dealing with the outcomes. He helps the client to
make use of negative evidence instead of displacing it with
extorted and unrealistic positive evidence.

Probably all of us have daily bouts in some
measure with hostility. Most of us are traditionally inclined to
see this hostility as a force welling up within us. When seen in
others, it is easy to interpret only as a desire to hurt,
especially if we must bear the brunt. Yet whether we experience
it in ourselves, or have to deal with it in our associates, the
key to its understanding is an appreciation of the person
himself. Behind the mask of his hostility, we find these key
features: deep concern with social relations, his far-reaching
convictions regarding human nature, the wager that he could not
afford to loose, and his frantic effort to collect winnings long
after the race was run and hopelessly lost.